


It’s Harder, When You’re Older, to Begin

by MoreHuman



Series: Decisions, Decisions [2]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Friendship, M/M, Queer Themes, References to Fun Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 02:27:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21384562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoreHuman/pseuds/MoreHuman
Summary: “Noted,” he says with a smile. “Can I tell you about how I had my Ring of Keys moment in Ray’s front room, filling out incorporation papers?”———————Stevie takes Patrick to the theater. He’s not prepared.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer & Stevie Budd, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: Decisions, Decisions [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1541620
Comments: 144
Kudos: 488





	It’s Harder, When You’re Older, to Begin

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for mentions of suicide.
> 
> This is more a thematic companion piece to “Easiest Decision of My Life” than an actual sequel, so you don’t need to read both to follow the story.
> 
> I tried to give as much context to the _Fun Home_ references as possible, but you might enjoy this more if you’re at least familiar with the songs “Changing My Major,” “Ring of Keys,” “Days and Days,” and “Edges of the World.” Better yet, listen to the whole soundtrack. Best yet, find a production near you if you can.
> 
> Tl;dr _Fun Home_ is a queer musical full of queer feels and Patrick’s about to catch some.

“Remind me what we’re doing here again?” Patrick asks as they take their seats. Not that he needs a particular reason to visit the theater in Elm Valley, but Stevie spent the whole drive here like a woman on a mission. If David had been in the car, he’d have told her to stop hunching over the steering wheel like a gargoyle.

“Recon,” Stevie says. “Mrs. Rose told me about this girl she ‘discovered’ in the middle school. I believe ‘budding ingenue in the rough’ were her exact words, which is more mixed than her metaphors normally get, so you know she’s excited. She’s thinking about doing _Annie_.”

“And?” Patrick asks. From the disgust in Stevie’s voice, there’s something he’s not following.

“_And_, I was really hoping after _Cabaret_ that my next role might involve, you know,” she gestures down her body, “clothes. Like a full set. Not just undergarments.”

Patrick’s following now, enough to know how to tease her. “And you think you’ll get Mrs. Hannigan because…?”

“Mrs. Rose said we ‘share an aura.’”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. Save me.”

“So you want to convince her to do this instead.” Patrick leafs through the program in his hands. “_Fun Home_. What’s it about?”

Stevie shrugs. “It has a lead part for a middle school girl and everyone in the production stills is fully clothed. That’s as far as I got.”

“Stevie, the male lead in this is old. Like, _I’m playing your father_ old.” He points to the actor’s headshot in the program for emphasis. “That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?”

“You’d prefer Daddy Warbucks?” 

She’s got him there and she knows it. 

“I’ll keep an open mind.”

“That’s the spirit,” she says, leaning in to whisper the next part as the house lights dim. “By the way, there’s no intermission so I hope you don’t have to pee.”

“Thank you for the ample warning,” he whispers back.

***

The audience stays on its feet for the entire curtain call. When the applause finally subsides, Patrick hears Stevie saying, “Well, that costume is _definitely_ more my speed–” and then she’s saying “Fuck, oh fuck, Patrick,” and Patrick realizes he’s hearing her and not seeing her because he’s bent over in his seat, sobbing into his hands.

“Patrick, fuck,” Stevie says again. He can feel her fingers hovering over him, disrupting his airspace but unsure where to land.

“I’m—I’m–” he chokes out, but can’t manage more than that.

“Nope. Turn around,” she says to someone above him. Her hands may be lost, but her voice is not fucking around. “You’re not getting out this way, we need a minute.”

“I’m—I’m–” he tries again. She’s started rubbing circles on his back. Clumsy but deliberate, like a child sounding out a long word. God, he must look so pathetic for her to be trying this hard.

He assumes he’s trying to say _I’m okay_ or _I’m fine_ or even _I’m sorry_, because he gets very Canadian when he’s upset. Instead the words crawling up his throat are _I’m gay_, and it’s so absurd that he laughs a little into his next sob. Stevie knows that. Stevie was at his wedding; Stevie was in the room when he told his parents; Stevie was there when the word “boyfriend” coming out of David’s mouth lit him up like a glowworm. Stevie’s always been there.

“I’m gay!” When he finally gets it out it sounds like an accusation, and he’s starting to understand why he needed to say it.

He’s got himself under control enough now that he can at least look at her, and that’s encouraging. She quirks her mouth like she’s about to repeat some of what he was just thinking back to him. And then she catches up.

“Oh no.” Her hands fly to her mouth and she looks from him to the now empty stage and then back to him. “I didn’t think—I should have warned you.”

“You think?!” he says around a heaving breath that’s both a laugh and a sob. His lungs are exhausted from multitasking.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize it would be so…” She winces. “Feelings-y. For you. I didn’t think it through.”

“It’s okay,” Patrick says. He’s being unfair, he knows. The main character had looked out into the audience and told them exactly where her story was going, right after the second song. Something like, _My dad and I grew up in the same small town. And he was gay, and I was gay. And he killed himself._ What could Stevie have said that would’ve prepared him more than that?

His next breath is a full laugh, and the next is just a breath. Progress. “I’m glad you brought me. Really. I loved it. I’m fine.”

“No offense,” Stevie says with a grimace. “But you look… very not fine.”

“Thank you for breaking it to me so gently in my fragile state.”

She’s rummaging in her bag for something. His cheeks and palms are slick with a goo that he’d rather not think about too hard. 

“Sorry, I usually have like a pound of takeout napkins in here, but David and I went to the movies last week and he insisted on triple-butter popcorn so…”

Just as Patrick starts to feel this fresh sense of control slipping away through his gooey fingers, a pure white handkerchief appears in front of his face.

“Keep it, handsome,” says an impossibly rich voice. The voice’s owner is silhouetted against the house lights from this angle, but Patrick can see a white blouse, blue eyeshadow against dark skin, a neatly trimmed beard. He takes the handkerchief, but there must be something in his expression, because his hand is suddenly grasped between two others, soft and strong. He tries not to imagine how sticky that must feel.

“Don’t even worry, sweetie. We’ve all been there.”

Then the silhouette is gone and Patrick could cry all over again. That was the first time a stranger like that, a visibly queer stranger, has looked at him without David at his side and said “we.”

“Was that my guardian angel?” Patrick sniffs, putting the handkerchief to work and starting to feel human again.

“I don’t know,” Stevie says, “but Mrs. Rose would kill for that blouse.”

***

“Okay.” Stevie sets one beer down in front of Patrick and slides into the opposite side of the booth with the other. “Process some feelings at me.”

They’re camped out at some hotel bar Stevie’s been to before but doesn’t want to talk about having been to before. “Your husband is a big fan of their karaoke and Polar Bear shots,” was all she’d say. He’s pretty sure he can track that particular hangover of David’s back to her Emir days, and decides not to push. He also decides not to let her order any Polar Bear shots.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says, looking at his beverage and not at her.

“I really do, and you’re stalling.”

She’s right. He’d managed to bottle up whatever had happened back at the theater, but that’s exactly how he feels. Bottled. Sealed. Airtight. But still sloshing around inside. This metaphor is making him thirsty, so he drinks.

“You don’t–” Stevie twists her beer on the table, probably not looking at him either. “You don’t have to tell me everything, but whatever you need to say… I’m here.” 

_You’ve always been here,_ he wants to say, but she’s being very nice to him and it would be wrong to torture her with too much sincerity.

“Just not too many details about how you ‘changed your major to David’ in my bed, okay?” Her finger quotes around the euphemism are so aggressive, he can hear them in her voice. “I still have to sleep at night.”

Patrick had been laughing harder than anyone during that number, the main character’s morning-after song about her first sexual experience with a woman. He’d known Stevie would notice, would do the math, but he couldn’t help himself. That terrifying giddiness felt so familiar.

_I’m radiating happiness._

He’s always had a good ear for lyrics, a knack for memorizing the ones that speak to him after just one listen. His friends in high school would take turns doing impressions of him, leaning into the radio or pointing up at the gym ceiling during prom, shrieking “Listen to the lyrics!” His head is buzzing with too many words right now.

_And my heart feels complete._

That’s not actually the song he wants to talk about.

“Noted,” he says with a smile. “Can I tell you about how I had my Ring of Keys moment in Ray’s front room, filling out incorporation papers?”

Stevie’s entire face falls open. “_David_ was your–”

“He was my old-school butch, yeah.”

“_Yes_.” She makes a big show of leaning onto the table, propping her chin in her palm. A fake gesture to hide her genuine enthusiasm. “Tell me _everything_ about that.”

“Well…” Patrick hesitates, not at all sure how to explain why a preteen lesbian singing about watching a delivery woman with short hair and lace-up boots across a diner had reminded him of David. He leans into the lyrics on a loop in his head.

_Like no one I ever saw before._

“I’d been attracted to other men before, though I didn’t always know it at the time. But they’d all been straight, I think, so it wasn’t–”

_The just-right clothes you’re wearing._

“I noticed everything about him, all at once. It was like I recognized him.”

_I think we’re alike in a certain way_. 

“It really was this series of—of _half_ revelations, I guess.”

_I feel… _  
_I want… _  
_I… um…_

“I couldn’t stop smiling like an idiot, and I overcompensated with a very unprofessional amount of snark. I just wanted so badly for him to notice me. Like there was something I needed him to see.”

_I know you. I know you. I know you._

Patrick twists his wedding ring. Around and around and around. It’s a habit he’s picked up only partly because David gets so adorably distressed about it. “It looks like you’re dying to take it off!” Patrick hasn’t told him yet that it’s the opposite. That he loves the friction, the heft of it on his finger. Weighing himself down with responsibility and commitment has always been Patrick’s way of telling himself who he is. And David Rose’s husband is exactly who he is.

“I’m good at making decisions,” Patrick says. “I like that I’m a decisive person. But David’s attention was the first thing I’d ever wanted without deciding to want it. I didn’t know that could happen.”

He starts thinking about all of the things he’d decided to want before meeting David, and then very quickly stops.

“I can’t play that part, Stevie. The dad. Bruce.”

“Okay.” She says it slow and deep, like she’s talking to a spooked horse. That’s how he can tell he’s on the verge of tears again.

He keeps his eyes on his wedding ring. Around and around and around.

“Before I moved to Schitt’s Creek, I could’ve drawn a circle on the map around my entire life. There was a time when I thought—no, I was _sure_—that everything I could ever want was inside it.”

He thinks about Bruce’s final song, right before he’d stepped in front of the truck that killed him.

_I had a life I thought I understood._

“The first time David met me he said I must be extremely sure of myself. And I really was. I always have been. And it… It’s scary. I spent all those years of my life so sure of myself, and so wrong.”

_It’s a lot;  
_ _It’s a lot to keep under control._

“I almost had that life. Full of things I chose to give my attention to. Not—funeral directing, obviously, or home restoration. But baseball, and my guitar. And kids. And the wife who–”

The wife’s final song had been about how she’d let her husband’s lie consume her life bit by bit, day after day, for decades.

_And he said I understood how the world made him ache._

“Who–”

_But no.  
_ _But no._

“I almost–”

_No one clocks the day you disappear._

“I almost missed my life, Stevie. I wasted so much time.”

He can’t see his wedding ring anymore, something about his vision has gone cloudy, but he can feel it still. Around and around and around.

Stevie touches her hand to his, once. Not a gentle or reassuring touch. A hard tap, like hitting an off switch. He stops twisting and wipes his eyes. His fingers come away wet, but at least his cheeks are dry.

“I’m not–” Stevie clears her throat. She tries to make it sound like a cough—there’s nothing inherently emotional about a cough—but Patrick knows plausible deniability when he hears it. “I don’t know what the right thing to say here is–”

Patrick laughs. “That makes two of us.”

“But you didn’t waste anything. You took care of yourself until your life was ready for you.”

He looks up at her, his friend. At her dark eyes, and her fair skin, and her serious mouth that’s creased only slightly at one corner, the single crack letting her affection shine through. Everything about her is steady, and clear, and beautiful. He imagines her deciding to give her attention to the motel all those years ago, sticking herself behind a desk to be out of the way.

_You took care of yourself, too,_ he wants to say, but she would hate it. _You wasted nothing._

Instead he says, “Thank you. That... feels like a pretty right thing to say.”

“As for playing the part,” she goes on, “I once got some great advice from a famous director: _Use it._ This fear you have about the life you almost had? Bring it to the character and he will feel real.”

“Ah, so this is all about convincing me to play the part?” Patrick smiles, easing back onto solid ground. “I’m sensing an ulterior motive here, Mrs. Hannigan.”

“Hey, my costume preferences are purely incidental to this conversation.” She holds up her hands, palms out. “I’m just trying to give you the tools to find some peace with your past.”

“You mean before David rescued me?”

“Patrick,” she says in a voice that adds the _ You dummy _ all on its own. “You rescued yourself. You’re the one who stepped out of that circle around your life. David was just… there.”

“You were there, too,” he says, unable to hold back his sincerity any longer. And not even because he wants to torture her with it.

He watches a softness pass over her face, just for a moment. Then her jaw clenches over it, swallows it, keeps it private.

“Shut up,” she says. “This is a really sweet moment, but if you make me cry I will murder you.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

Patrick nods.

“All right,” he says. He pulls his debit card from his wallet and slides it across the table to her. “Go order us a round of Polar Bear shots and bring them up to the stage. I’m picking out a duet at the karaoke machine.”

She’s glaring daggers at him, but he’s already on his feet.

“Come on,” he says. “We’ll make it a family tradition.”


End file.
